


sorry about the blood in your mouth; i wish it was mine.

by only_more_love



Series: Remix Fics [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Kidnapping, Let's play a game called How do we make things worse?, M/M, Mindfuck, Non-Consensual Drug Use, POV Steve Rogers, POV Tony Stark, Protective Steve Rogers, Rape/Non-con Elements, Remix, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Torture, photostatic veil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:39:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22741885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/only_more_love/pseuds/only_more_love
Summary: Afghanistan, never more than a handful of memories away, rears up, ugly and dissonant. His heart begins to race in anticipation of drowning. Muscle memory: it’s there, so easily accessed.Tony is kidnapped. It costs him and Steve. Dearly.Set in the nebulous period after Captain America: Civil War and before Avengers: Infinity War.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: Remix Fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1648132
Comments: 33
Kudos: 149
Collections: 2020 Captain America/Iron Man Remix Exchange





	sorry about the blood in your mouth; i wish it was mine.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [masterlokisev159](https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterlokisev159/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Kidnapped](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16305746) by [masterlokisev159](https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterlokisev159/pseuds/masterlokisev159). 



> Please check the tags before reading this story; there are oblique references to torture and rape. I don't think they're graphic, but that's subjective. If you have questions about specifics, please leave a comment. I'll answer to the best of my ability.
> 
> Many thanks to multiplefandomfan for cheer reading this before I posted. xoxo

A series of light taps resounds against the bathroom door.

Steve huffs out a breath through his nose and tips a glance over his shoulder, but quickly returns his attention to his hands. The water he keeps running in a slow stream as he digs one fingernail under another, trying to get at what’s trapped beneath.

The slip-slide-glide of a soap sliver over his palms and between his fingers. As he scrubs and scrubs at his cuticles—until his skin pinkens from the rough handling—and the tiny wrinkles like tributaries surrounding his knuckles, the tepid water trickling over his skin gradually shifts from clear to the color of rust. He keeps his eyes wide open until they start to burn; watches the water sluice over the gouges in the stained sink bowl and wash down the drain with a muted gurgle. 

Part of him wishes he could follow the water.

Sad, tired bathroom. 

Sad, tired man.

Steve blinks. The spiderwebbed mirror hanging above the sink returns Steve to himself, but he ignores his face—he's not interested in observing his own dull eyes and weak, lying mouth—and stares, instead, at his chest, in the splintered and warped glass. At the star-shaped negative space in what used to be his uniform. 

There is more negative space left there, too, in the shape of Tony Stark. 

It’s superimposed over the star, pulsing with vibrant color and light, even though it isn’t visible in the mirror under the sparse, flickering illumination offered by a single naked bulb. 

_How were you guys planning on beating that?_

_Together._

_We'll lose._

_Then we'll do that together, too._

_Don't bullshit me, Rogers. Did you know?_

_BullshitBullshitBullshitBullshit._

It echoes in his head, but not loudly. Muffled. Like the words are traveling across a great distance, or through deep water. 

He’ll call him. Tonight, he promises himself. He’ll punch in the numbers that will make the burner phone he mailed along with his letter months ago trill. 

In his pocket. In his workshop. In his desk. In his bedside table. 

Does he keep it charged? Will it ring? Or did he smash it the way Steve smashed the shield into his chest—and leave it in the snow, in a public trash can on a dirty street corner, on a pockmarked sidewalk for pigeons to shit on and thousands of indifferent shoes to grind into dust? 

None of these are questions Steve has answers for. 

_If you need me, I’ll be there._

The grand irony here, of course, is that he _doesn’t_ need Steve; Steve’s phone has never rung. With his ( _gold-titanium alloy, Cap_ ) suit and his brains and his bravery and his charm, what would he ever need Steve for? 

But his silence rings so loud, reverberating with his laughter and the quicksilver whirlpools of all the words he ever spun around Steve while a knowing twinkle flashed in his brown eyes.

(Brown might have been dull or ultilitarian; the artist in Steve knows it isn't. Brown is sable brushes—and rich, dark soil, spring-warm under the soles of Steve's feet and full of green, growing things. No, brown isn't dull.)

Tony's absence carves away parts of Steve that he didn’t realize were essential until they were hollowed out, leaving behind only raw, bloody-edged wounds that not even the serum can heal.

Steve is the world’s foremost expert in waiting too long, in understanding too little, too late.

Steve’s in Colombia, at least for the moment, and _he’s_ in NY. Steve’s lies and three thousand miles separate them. The latter seems more easily surmounted than the former.

He doesn’t need Steve, but Steve needs him. 

Tonight, Steve vows, he will call him. 

Lies of omission; lies of commission. All. Still. Lies.

The knocks sound again, more insistent this time, blasting through his thoughts. “Steve,” Nat calls. Her voice through the thin door is an IED, and Steve, he knows. 

With a sharp twist of his wrist, he shuts off the faucet. _Plink plink plink._ A steady, maddening drip continues.

Without seeing Nat’s face, without hearing the details yet, he _knows,_ with a terrible certainty that freezes his gut and makes him wonder how much shrapnel what’s coming will leave trapped under his skin. Even before she continues speaking, even without searching the green eyes he used to find opaque and unreadable, Steve knows. “You need to see this.” Nat's voice, calm, cool, still waters. Because she's a professional. But there is a discordant note in it, the wrong piano key struck by a clumsy finger.

_Plink plink plink._

The world ends and begins in the horrible mundane.

Steve's grip tightens with an ominous creak, his knuckles going white; the handle breaks off in his hand. 

He’s always been better at breaking things than fixing them.

* * *

  
  
Tony jerks awake, heart rabbiting. Instinctively, his hands want to fly to his chest to sweep across the space where the arc reactor used to sit, and reassure himself that everything’s okay. 

Everything’s not okay. 

As soon as he reaches for his chest, his wrists twang with pain; they’re locked tight above his head, his arms yanked taut. 

He remembers...grabbing about a gallon of coffee to counteract the effects of insomnia that’s only worsened since Siberia. He got back into the R8 to head to the compound. After that, there is a terrifying nothing as he tries and fails to trace time through long, empty corridors in his mind.

Tony’s been kidnapped before. He’s done this song and dance already. Someone wants something from him; sooner or later, he’ll learn what it is.

Stay calm, he tells himself, trying to take stock of the situation. Whatever’s happening, Tony knows he needs to remain calm and bide his time. There will be a chance to escape, or someone will come for him, eventually, won’t they?

Shivers wrack him from his fingers to his toes that just barely graze what feels like a cold concrete floor. From the chill that runs the entire length of his aching body, he surmises that he’s been worked over, and he’s naked. Dull pain throbs in his eye sockets, his head unpleasantly fogged over, and sitting so heavy on his neck. But when he blinks, his vision is obscured. Surrounding him, darkness. Sure, he can breathe easily enough through his nose, but there’s something over his eyes. A blindfold, maybe. 

Again, he strains to tug his hands free of whatever’s holding them. A rattling sound hits his ears, but there’s no slack in his bindings. The only thing his wasted effort gets him is a wrenched shoulder and enough momentum to send him slamming against the wall behind him with bone-rattling force. 

The collision rockets fire through him, laying down an additional stratum of pain, and forces a pained grunt through his lips. It’s muffled, though, by the gag they stuffed in his mouth. The gag tastes and smells foul, and as Tony’s body swings wildly, nausea threatens to overwhelm him.  
  
  


* * *

Tony can’t see anything past the veil of darkness over his eyes. His ears, however, catch a harsh creaking sound, and he shivers again as a draft pricks his bare skin. The opening of a door, perhaps.  
  
Warm hands remove the blindfold, and a thumb brushes over his eyebrow, lingering and intimate in a way that makes Tony’s stomach clench. “Oh, good, Mr. Stark. You’re awake. I’ve so been looking forward to getting to know you better.”

The sudden flare of bright light after so long in the darkness makes Tony’s eyes sting and water. He blinks back the reflexive tears and trains his focus outward. Three huge men dressed in unrelieved black stare back at him. Unsurprisingly, two of them wear ski masks. Boring. Typical. The only bare-faced man has dirty blond hair and wears wire-rimmed glasses.

It is that man who speaks. “Tsk tsk.” He reaches out, and in a gross mockery of gentleness, strokes his fingers next to Tony’s eyes. “No need for tears, Tony. May I call you Tony?" His tone is conversational, casual. He speaks as if they are friends; he has never seen this man before. "Of course, I can. No need for formality between lovers, hmm?”

Lovers. The word hits him like a backhand to the face. Tony grunts, unable to speak because of the gag in his mouth, and tries to shake off the man’s touch. But the man’s free hand comes up to join the one that is already there, and suddenly, Tony’s cheeks are cradled between two large palms, framed like artwork. He can’t control it, how his breath comes faster and faster, as an awful suspicion slithers up his spine. Small, choked-off noises are born in his mouth, only to die there, as well.

"Shh. Relax, darling. Calm yourself, Tony. I would never hurt you. I only want to make you feel good. In fact"—his kidnapper pauses his monologue and gestures for his muscle to approach, and instinctively Tony tries to kick out, only to be stymied by his bound feet and his own numbing fatigue—"I have a little something that will be just perfect for you.” His voice is a purr—a sickening, self-satisfied caress that deepens Tony’s growing horror. 

"Oh, no, Tony,” his kidnapper says, mouth pursed in a faux pout, as if he senses Tony’s panic. “You mustn't panic. How will your captain feel when he sees you like this in high definition?"

Captain? Surely, he doesn’t mean—

The man gestures with his hand, nearly elegant, a conductor leading an orchestra of the macabre. One of his thugs hands him a filled syringe that glimmers in the light. He sighs with reptilian pleasure as he flicks the syringe before returning his attention to Tony. “Ah, we all need a social lubricant sometimes. Wine, whiskey, Rohypnol...Here’s a little something to help us move things in the right direction. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself trying to escape. After all, I’ve heard you have a will of, shall we say, iron.” Laughing softly at his own joke, he slides the needle into Tony’s neck. It burns. “Let’s begin with a kiss. What’s a budding romance without a kiss?” 

Still smirking, he removes the gag from Tony’s mouth. Tony’s head is beginning to go fuzzy and soft-edged, but as he blinks, his kidnapper moves his fingers near his own face. From one drowsy blink to the next, Tony is left staring at Steve. But that doesn’t make any sense.

Before he can ponder it further, before he can even try and make sense of what doesn't make sense, the man’s mouth presses against Tony’s, his tongue inexorable as it snakes into Tony’s mouth, and Tony, even as he starts to go under, marshals all his strength, and snarls. With a snap of teeth, he tastes blood. He gains a mere five seconds’ reprieve as the man jerks back with a hiss. Then he steps behind Tony, his shoes clicking against the floor, and wraps his arms around him in a suffocating hug.

“Darling, I like a little struggle. It keeps things interesting, and heaven knows I hate being bored,” he says, in Steve’s voice, in Tony’s ear, and rubs himself against Tony’s naked back. Having him behind Tony, where Tony can't see him or what he's about to do, quickens Tony's pulse. "I often find it adds spice—a certain _je ne sais quoi_ , if you will."

Tony can feel his captor’s hardness pressing against him, and he wants to scream, he wants to fight, but blackness encroaches on the periphery of his vision. He is spiraling down a dark, narrow tunnel.

Down.

D  
o  
w  
n.

D... 

* * *

  
  
A large, metal vat sits approximately twenty feet in front of where Tony hangs. One of the head honcho’s thugs catches Tony’s gaze and continues to hold it as water sputters and begins to pour from a thick hose in his hand and into the vat. His lips bend into a slow, cruel smile that does nothing to settle Tony’s stomach. When he winks, Tony shuts his eyes and swallows back bile. 

Afghanistan, never more than a handful of memories away, rears up, ugly and dissonant. His heart begins to race in anticipation of drowning. Muscle memory: it’s there, so easily accessed. 

The man with the hose fills his cupped hand with water, then flings it at Tony. Against his will, at the touch of the freezing water, Tony flinches. A jagged gasp stutters from his mouth. 

Everything is water. 

His nerves his spine his blood his bowels his breath his bones…

In his nose, in his mouth, in his eyes, in his ears…

Everything is water. 

Fractals of color explode behind his eyelids.

He can’t breathe. 

Everything. Water.

The world narrows to this:

No air, no air, no air, no air.  
  
Nononononononononononono.

* * *

In the video sent to him, this is what Steve sees:

When they lower Tony from the ceiling and drag him across the floor, toward a large tub of water, he struggles. (He's so much thinner than he was when Steve last saw him in a cold bunker in Siberia, and he looks smaller than Steve is used to, as well. With his incandescent smile and his seemingly limitless energy, Tony has always seemed to take up a disproportionate amount of space. Not now, though.)

Tony tries to fight, Steve notes with a fierce surge of pride. But his hands and feet are bound, his bare skin that Steve still dreams about touching, mottled with bruises.

He is, after all, so very human. 

He is, after all, so very alone. 

Steve doesn’t want to see anymore, not when he can't help Tony. Not when he's forced to be an audience member for this sadistic pornography. Not when he's helpless to stop whatever atrocity is about to unfold.

His eyes want to close, but he presses his lips together tightly and forces himself to watch. If Tony has no choice here, then neither does Steve. Steve’s hands curl into fists until his nails bite bloody half-moons into his palms.

Tony doesn’t beg. He doesn’t plead. He doesn't weep. But the whites of his eyes are wide, so wide, beacon-bright in his pale face, and filled with animal panic. Steve remembers that look from Siberia. On the rare occasions when he sleeps, it haunts his dreams.

“No,” Tony says, shaking his head like that will do anything to stop the inevitable. “No. No. No. No. No.” A litany that only breaks when a man with blond hair steps into the frame of the video. He turns, appearing to grin directly at Steve, and Steve gasps when he sees his own face, minus his current beard and dark hair, eyeing him with glee. “Cap, no. No. No. No. No.” 

Sam’s hand grips Steve’s arm, hard, but Steve, he can’t move. His breath is almost a wheeze, his chest aching with it. 

“Steve,” is the final word that cracks from Tony’s lips, and then Steve’s doppelganger forces Tony’s head into the water.   
  
  


* * *

Steve’s hands shake as he dials an old, familiar number. Not Tony's, as he'd planned. “Nick,” he says, as soon as the call connects.

* * *

There are big, warm hands on Tony’s back. They press, hard, harder, and harder still, until he is facedown in the mattress. 

“You are so very beautiful like this,” Steve says, his touch at odds with his words, and Tony, who once dreamed of Steve’s hands moving over his body and his lips touching his lips, knows only betrayal and burning pain as it feels like his body is being split, separated into its base components. No lube. No prep. No affection. Just unyielding hands bruising the tender skin of his hips, and a body inside him, where he didn't ask it to be. Intruder, intruder, flashes on a screen in his brain. He'd like to laugh, he really would, but the half-choked noise he makes isn't a laugh.  
  
Funny—he'd always thought that like this, Steve's hands would be kind. 

Idiot, he thinks. Fool. Just one more thing he got wrong. 

His head feels floaty and strange, his vision blurry and off-center, and there is something hovering just at the edge of his consciousness. It tickles him, this knowledge that he is missing something crucial.

Tony has always loved puzzles.

A handful of brutal thrusts—and Tony thinks he must have done something truly horrific for Steve to treat him like this, even after everything they've done to each other—and Tony feels wet warmth fill him and fill him and fill him until his body can't keep it in anymore, and it starts leaking out.

He has time to breathe, to hover on the borderland between sleep and wakefulness, when a hand starts to stroke his cock. Slow at first, with the occasional swipe across the head, and then faster. In spite of himself, pressure begins to build and coil inside his body. He won't call it pleasure; that's not what it is. And it's not happening to him but to his traitorous body, which is separate from Tony himself. Tony drifts somewhere near the ceiling, high, so high, above the scene playing out below like theater in the round. His body is just a thing. Meat, that's all. Nothing more.  
  
He dreams of sunlight gilding his face and a warm breeze ruffling his hair. How long has it been since he's felt either? Seconds melt into minutes into hours into how many days, Tony no longer knows. 

Kisses rain over his shoulders, making Tony's body shiver and push back against the warm, solid presence behind him. 

"I love you, darling," Steve says, gently. "I love you so much." Tony doesn't believe him, but for once, he keeps his stupid mouth shut. Steve's hand twists on Tony's cock. 

Who will come for Tony?

The cliff appears sooner than expected. Just as Tony's body catapults over the edge, groaning and shuddering, Steve presses a kiss behind his ear and says, “You will be alone, always, and then you will die.”

* * *

The imposter wearing Steve's face, body, and voice like a snakeskin rolls his hips, all lazy, sinuous grace, as he violates the prone body bound beside him. "Say it," he says, trailing the back of his hand over the side of Tony's face in a gesture laced with latent violence. A sleeping serpent is still a serpent. Eventually, Steve will break that hand. The other one, too. Steve will splinter every bone in that man's body; will make his red blood run like a river. "Say it, my darling." His hand finds Tony's flat, brown nipple and twists it until Tony's vacant face spasms in a rictus of agony.  
  
He shouldn't be beautiful. Not like this. But he is: the [_Pietà_](https://mymodernmet.com/michelangelo-pieta/)made flesh.

"I love you, Steve," Tony says, the sound of something priceless shattering. A lone drop of blood wells up, scarlet against the pale canvas of Tony's lips, and slides down and disappears inside his goatee, where Steve can't see it anymore.

Steve throws up.

* * *

After endless days and nights of dead ends, they find him.

When he, Nat, and Sam finally reach Tony, Steve ignores the winding trail of bodies he leaves behind him like breadcrumbs leading to Tony. They don't matter.

He's silent, but only because he can't fathom what to say.   
  
Everything in him screams Tony's name. Everything except his mouth.

Steve only pauses to wipe the blood on his hands on the worn fabric of his dirty uniform before he kneels beside the bed where Tony is lying spread-eagled and bound with chains and with silken scarves of crimson and gold. A still life of suffering. He frees Tony, and his hands tremble as they touch Tony's unshaven cheeks.

Tony stares back at him, eyes glazed and distant, the light that always shone in them snuffed out. He grazes Steve's beard with his hand, then stares down at his red-stained fingertips, frowning as he rubs his fingers together.

His dry, chapped lips part. A single word falls, a desiccated leaf skittering over autumn-chilled pavement: "Why?"

Leaning forward, Steve tries to stroke the dark, tousled halo of Tony's hair—he just wants to help; to be of some use to Tony even when the unthinkable has become monstrously real—but Tony shifts away, leaving Steve clutching air. Steve has to swallow, twice, before he can finally speak past the boulder in his throat. "Why what, Tony?" He doesn't recognize the crumbling ruin of his own voice.

The long, dark arc of Tony's lashes sweeps down to conceal his eyes. "Why do you hate me so much?" Tony asks. "I would've—" Their gazes mesh, and the impact knocks something loose inside Steve. "If you'd just asked me, instead of...instead of..." Tony starts to shake, his teeth clacking together like dry bones, and Steve wants to comfort him; wants to say the right thing. Wants to say _anything_. But Sam pulls him back with a firm touch and murmured words Steve can’t parse because of the cacophony in his own head, and Nat comes around the other side of the bed and wraps a towel around Tony's hunched shoulders. "I would've..." Tony whispers, his paper-pale face averted and his dark eyes riveted on his unsteady hands. Three of his fingernails are missing, his nail beds raw and messy. "I would've."

In a room redolent with despair, head bowed like a penitent, Steve closes his eyes and waits for the icy ocean to swallow what's left of him. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. If you have time to share your thoughts, I'd love to hear them. Kudos and comments are greatly appreciated. Should you wish to reblog it, the tumblr post for this fic is [here](https://onlymorelove.tumblr.com/post/611431133905895424/a-remix-of-masterlokisev159s-fic-kidnapped). You can find me at [onlymorelove.tumblr.com](http://onlymorelove.tumblr.com). Come talk to me if you like. I do not bite. :) Sometimes you can also find me on Discord.
> 
> I borrowed a line from Richard Siken's "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out" and made minor punctuation changes to it. The original line is, "You will be alone always and then you will die." You can read the entire poem [here](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48158/litany-in-which-certain-things-are-crossed-out). The title of this story is borrowed from another Richard Siken poem. You can read "Little Beast" [here](http://youngerpoets.yupnet.org/2008/04/22/little-beast-crush-by-richard-siken/).


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